


No Time For Sorrow

by malinaldarose (coralysendria)



Series: Moments [5]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Community: trope_bingo, Heavy Angst, Movie Spoilers, Trope Bingo Amnesty, Unhappy Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-24
Updated: 2015-12-24
Packaged: 2018-05-08 20:06:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5511347
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coralysendria/pseuds/malinaldarose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>General Organa's thoughts during the Resistance attack on Starkiller Base.</p>
<p>Major spoilers for the movie.  I' m not kidding.  Don't read this if you haven't seen the movie.</p>
            </blockquote>





	No Time For Sorrow

**Author's Note:**

> This fills the Unhappy Ending square on my Trope Bingo Round Five (right? Five?) card.

General Leia Organa's brow furrowed in concentration as she listened to the braided, overlapping strands of Resistance communications as their fighters attacked Starkiller Base. In how many other command centers had she done the same? So many battles that she had long since lost count. Whether with the Rebellion or the Resistance, it seemed that nothing changed; she had spent so much time standing in dimly-lit rooms full of charts and monitors, droids and humans all in a state of controlled panic; or, with the old Senate and the new, in vast, echoing chambers, battling intransigent minds with the power of her voice and her logic. Except for a brief few golden weeks after the destruction of the second Death Star and the end of the Empire, it felt as though she had spent her entire life fighting.

She was long past weary. And her feet hurt.

This battle over a vast killing machine, reminded her so much of that first Death Star battle, when she had found herself listening for the call sign assigned to a young farmboy from Tattooine. It was hard to believe how dear he had become to her; she smiled sometimes, when no one could see her, to remember his crush on her -- before either of them knew their true relationship. Her twin brother had been a warm, supportive presence at the back of her mind through her tempestuous marriage to Han Solo, the births of her children, through all the battles as they struggled to rebuild the Republic. She missed Luke. He had removed himself from her life so thoroughly that even that warm place in her mind was cold and empty, just as his home had been after Ben -- after Kylo Ren betrayed them all.

After the fall of the Empire, Luke had wanted to train Leia as a Jedi. "We need to rebuild the Order," he said -- enough times that it became tiresome. 

"I can't," she had said each time, as patiently as she could. "I can't, Luke. We also need to rebuild the Senate and the goverment of the Republic. We need to weed out the last remnants of the Empire, or we'll never have peace. Please, Luke. Please understand. We each have our own paths. Yours is to rebuild the Jedi. This is mine."

She did finally accept some training in her abilities; she was a skilled enough Force-user to have heard Ben Kenobi's voice in her mind once or twice. The day she heard Anakin Skywalker's voice, though, was the day she ended her training. As far as she was concerned, Bail Organa was her father, and that was the end of that; she found that when it came to Darth Vader, she did not possess the boundless compassion of her twin brother. She was glad Vader was dead, and refused to be haunted by him. Her name was Organa, not Skywalker.

She had all but demanded training for her son, though. He would not suffer for its lack as she and Luke had. Ben had shown so much promise. She sometimes wondered what voices had whispered in his mind, what promises they had made to make him do what he had done. In the grim, dark nights when she couldn't sleep, it occurred to her that in denying Anakin's shade, perhaps she had made it haunt her son, instead. She must surely bear _some_ fault for what had happened.

And her daughter...her lost daughter. In an echo of what had been decreed for the children of Anakin Skywalker, when the son of Leia Organa betrayed the Light, her daughter was hidden to save the child from her elder brother's madness. Even Leia did not know what had become of her. She would be an adult now. Leia hoped that she was happy.

The Force, or perhaps Fate -- or perhaps they were one and the same -- was drawing things together for some huge event; Leia felt it. A stormtrooper breaking his conditioning and saving a Resistance pilot, a Force-sensitive young woman appearing, and Han returning from his self-imposed exile just as they finally found the last piece of the map to where Luke had hidden himself? It could not be coincidence. 

Leia was following the battle not just on the various displays and through the audio chatter, but also in her mind. It was a long time since she had reached so far, but she knew the instant Han saw Kylo Ren; she heard him calling out to their son with the name of his birth.

She felt Ben's struggle; there _was_ Light in him. Luke had once claimed the same for their father, and she _knew_ it for her son. Snoke had not claimed him utterly. _Please_ , she whispered to him -- or perhaps only to herself -- _please come back to us, my son. Please._

And then...Ben lost the struggle against Kylo Ren and his master. She felt the cold veil descend across his thoughts as he activated his weapon. She felt Han's death as a physical pain in her own heart, and she faltered. For an instant she thought she, too, would fall. As a young woman, she had witnessed the destruction of her entire planet, but even that had not struck her such a blow as witnessing the murder of her husband by her son. She floundered for the briefest of moments, before she remembered who she was, where she was, and the stakes involved. Han, like Alderaan, was gone. What had she said those decades ago? "We have no time for our sorrows." Yes. But.... She reached again, inwardly this time, prodding at the place in her mind where Luke had once been.

_Where are you, Luke? I need you!_ she cried into the vaults of her mind, but there was no response. Luke, too, was gone.

She was alone.

But in many ways, she had always been alone: Princess, Senator, Rebel, General. Leia squared her shoulders and returned her attention to the battle.

There was no time for sorrow.

**Author's Note:**

> Regarding Leia's lost daughter in this story, I will be very much surprised if we don't find out that Rey is Han and Leia's daughter. (She may be Luke's daughter, but storywise, it would be more powerful if she were Kylo Ren's younger sister, since if they follow the story trajectory they are setting up, it will come down to Rey vs. Ren in the end.) (She would have to be enough younger that he wouldn't recognize her as an adult.)


End file.
